Modern networking continues to provide electronic devices the ability to communicate with other devices. The continuing growth of networking systems and technology seems limitless and the speed of networked communications has brought benefits to nearly every human endeavor.
However, networks can consist of enormous numbers of devices. The complexity of networks continues to expand as does the application of network concepts to more and more disciplines and environments. More and more types of devices with differing specifications are added to the growing lists of elements within modern networks. A network may consist of a variety of types of devices, communicating over a variety of media and using various protocols. Such networks might include wireless devices, traditional voice, ATM, Frame Relay, Cable, DSL, and dial platforms. Optical networks are also becoming increasingly popular for performance reasons.
As networks get more complex, the design of network infrastructure, or interconnection fabric, becomes more important to the operating speed and efficiency of the all-up network. Consequently, increasing effort is put into improving configurations of complex networks from both a cost and speed viewpoint.
One area in which a cost-effective design is crucial is that of the rapidly emerging Fiber-Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) design. A SAN is a network of servers and storage devices that allows the sharing of huge stores of information among multiple user networks. SANs are extremely high-demand, high-speed, networks and their sizes have grown enormously. As a result, improving SAN design can significantly lower the cost of both construction and management of such networks.
Manual design of network infrastructure is a suitable technique in very small and simple networks. However, in large and complex networks, manual design techniques are iterative and tedious and rarely, if ever, produce an optimal result for any given network interconnection fabric requirement. Not only is the manual design process costly in terms of man-hours, deviations from an optimal design of the hubs, switches, routers, etc. needed in a network's infrastructure can result in money wasted on unnecessary interconnection equipment and higher maintenance costs. Moreover, manual methods can produce incorrect results in the sense that a manually designed network often fails to satisfy the performance requirements and/or physical constraints of the network components.
There are some automated design techniques in existence. However, these techniques either do not address physical constraints present in the SAN, do not produce cost-effective designs, or are very slow. Additionally, these techniques are often design-problem specific.
What is needed, then, is an automated method for designing networks that develops cost-effective design of interconnection fabrics by seeking low cost while simultaneously satisfying network performance requirements. Furthermore, the design method must be adaptable to the specific features of storage area network design problems and must be usable in available design systems.